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Introduction

Dactylic rhythm was always a favourite with Schubert, and this predilection probably goes back to his love of the slow movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. There are energetic works by Schubert which use the rhythm (the fifth of the Moments Musicaux, Op 94) but, like the Beethoven movement, the energy of Die Sterne is not about bluster and Sturm und Drang; it is the sublime, hidden motor of the universe, ticking away in 'heilsame Pflicht', a steady musical hum, like the big Top, linking the centuries together, hums ancient and modern, as it were. The song is pure delight; we hear the delight of the stargazer of course, but also the delight of the stars whose simple undending task it is to send out pulses of dancing light—'divine choreography' Capell calls it. The key changes suggest the stars in a moving axis, a cycle of thirds from the home key of E flat to C, then C flat to G, and then back to the starting point; all this seems a pre-ordained journey, as surprising in its variety and unexpected beauty as a voyage into space might be, but in the safe hands of a guiding force. The controlled rhythm (a little rubato is allowed here and there at the turning of astral corners, like an extra turn of the globe at leap-year) suggests divine order, and the happiness and goodness of that ordering. It is a song that manages to be touching in a personal way (for it is after all a prospective lover who sings it) but its greatness is in the link it suggests between heaven and earth, not a conventionally religious one, but one which the composer knew to be true. In this bright little song we catch a glimpse of the wisdom (innate as well as hard won) which was the sustaining force of Schubert's last years.

Recordings

'This would have been a massive project for even the biggest international label, but from a small independent … it is a miracle. An ideal Christ ...'Please give me the complete Hyperion Schubert songs set – all 40 discs –and, in the next life, I promise I'll "re-gift" it to Schubert himself … ...» More

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In the midst of all the little-known Leitner songs on this disc, a sudden star, one of the best-loved of all the composer’s nature depictions. In the light of what has already been written about a ‘Graz style’ it should come as no surprise that this music combines the cosy and the universal. This is definitely a view of the heavens from Styria where the poet appropriates the stars as his own and imagines them as good and worthy citizens of the heavens – twinkling philanthropists performing many a charitable task in that cheery context where one member of the community sees it as his duty to look after another. These stars shine down on a world which is ‘artless and sincere’ (Schubert’s words to Marie Pachler when he described how he found Graz different from Vienna). In this part of Austria the pilgrim still walks earnestly through the wood; it is still accepted that God’s in his Heaven which is naturally situated, like the stars themselves, in the azure above; falling in love is still something that happens once in a lifetime, signifying a lasting bond sealed with a celestial blessing.

The commentators have been less than kind about Leitner. Capell refers to his sentiments as ‘feeble-minded’ and Einstein as ‘pedantic and sentimental’. But it is clear that Schubert is charmed by this view of life as seen from the safety of uncynical Styria, and responds to it with a full heart, if also occasionally with a smile. The poetry fits happily with the composer’s own experience of Graz as a place apart; his fortnight there was somehow caught in a time-warp which made the harmless anachronisms of Leitner’s verse seem perfectly valid. Besides, Schubert is often in two minds about many things: during the autumn of 1827 he pens Im Dorfe from Winterreise where a traveller standing outside in the cold pours scorn on bourgeois values and those who dream safely in cushioned beds; from the same period comes Leitner’s Der Winterabend, a touching hymn to Biedermeier values sung from inside a warm comfortable house by an honest citizen who would have correctly regarded that frozen misanthrope as a visitor from another world.

One could not be a song composer in search of texts written by different people without a certain element of something like Keats’s ‘negative capability’ – a willingness and openness to make of oneself a blank sheet of paper waiting for the imprint of inspiration and experience from another source. Thus it is no surprise that the same composer could set to music the dark and comfortless pronouncements of the choral Grab und Mond (Seidl) as well as Die Sterne where the narrator seems not to have a moment of doubt about his faith in a divinely ordered world. Schubert seems to be a roving reporter in sound, scurrying around to gather up different sides of the same story: in the Schlegel setting Die Sterne the words are directed to mankind by the stars themselves, and in the Leitner song the compliment is returned as an earthbound human being pays tribute to these heavenly bodies. The paradox is that in the prayer-like music for Schlegel’s singing stars the awe of mankind is reflected, and in Leitner’s hymn where the words are put in the mouth of a mere mortal, we hear the energy and movement of the stars themselves.

The key is E flat major and the time signature 2/4 with a marking of ‘Etwas geschwind’. The moderating ‘etwas’ is of the essence for finding the correct tempo: this song has given its performers more trouble than most – too fast and the music rushes and gabbles (the piece is often wrongly performed as if it were written with half the number of barlines in an alla breve 2/2); too slow and the sparkle of the heavenly bodies becomes unsuitably sluggish. The short length of the bars is related to the versification of the text which is seldom printed correctly. Here is a clear case of the power of the appearance of the words on the printed page to influence the music. Apart from writing in dactylic metre, Leitner uses very short lines where pairs of words often stand alone, isolated like so many tiny stars, each one contributing a single moment of sparkle to the night sky. Although Schubert runs the first three lines of the poem together to make a single musical phrase, the 2/4 time signature, and the large number of resulting barlines, ensure emphases (for example on both ‘blitzen’ and ‘Sterne’ in the first verse) which preserve something of the poet’s telegraphese. The placing of the piano’s interludes also creates short, separate vocal phrases which are made to shine separately, each in its own little galaxy.

As Capell observes, Die Sterne is ‘a light and airy relation’ of the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, that movement in measured dactyls (crotchet + quaver + quaver or long - short - short) which was to be assimilated and recycled in so many ways by Schubert who was enamoured of the musical energy generated by these pulsations within a moto perpetuo. In his own vocabulary of tonal analogues, a word-to-music language already fluent in his adolescence, and increasingly sophisticated with the years, the forward propulsion of dactylic metre measures the continuing spin of nature at work, the hidden, throbbing dynamo which powers those aspects of human existence over which we are all powerless. In Der Tod und das Mädchen, the Senn Schwanengesang and another Leitner setting, Vor meiner Wiege, we encounter the unfaltering footstep of Death, a metre that might be named the terror dactyl. The sad and incontrovertible fact of love’s betrayal, deadly in its own way (Die Liebe hat gelogen) has a similar Bewegung. The seasons can also be heard to march in this rhythm (as in the triumphant return of Maytime at the end of Trockne Blumen from Die schöne Müllerin) and the world turns in dactyls as it gathers all, great and small, into her lap (Lied der Mutter Erde). Die Sterne is similarly cosmic, the movement of the stars being sometimes immutable, sometimes variable, but completely beyond human control. The song mentions death but only in a comforting way; that final journey remains a distant prospect in the song’s astrological chart; after all, the poet has not yet found a partner for life’s dance. In the meantime, the passing of time, the unrelenting tick-tock which makes something finite even of light years (or Leitner years perhaps) continues apace.

The first thing we hear in this song is a musical translation of flickering sparks of distantly generated energy. The stars radiate electricity (Schubert died some years before this force of nature was harnessed to any domestic purpose in Vienna) but the music seems to bristle with a measurable current, as if we were receiving a message in morse code from extraterrestrial beings. The sense of immense distance between the source of the message and its recipients is emphasised by the chain of modulations through which the sixteen-bar introduction passes. Here the repeated E flat major chords (with G at the top) seem at first to be a purely rhythmic gesture, but it soon becomes clear that these insistent notes (we hear ten of them) are actually part of a gradually changing tune, lift-off in slow motion. These dancing Gs are supplanted by seven B flats followed by four B naturals which lead via a circular detour to ten repeated Cs. Onward and ever upward! These notes pulsate away (always in dactylic rhythm) while the harmony underneath changes from C7 to F7; as the right-hand melody progresses even further up the stave (D – E flat – F) the harmonies move to B flat7 and thence back to E flat, the completion of the full harmonic circle effected by a diabolically delicate little turn under the pianist’s dancing fingers. (This decoration in the manner of something from a Haydn piano sonata is famously tricky, as is a similar mordent in the accompaniment for Lachen und Weinen.)

The journey implied by the introduction is both tiny and immense. Everything lies so closely under the pianist’s hands that he can negotiate the vast expanses of space and yet remain in the centre of the keyboard. But each link in this chain seems to represent a passage through a new galaxy where melody and harmony conjoin to give the impression of new vistas opening up in the music. That something should sound simultaneously so lofty and so friendly is a Schubertian miracle. The vocal line for ‘Wie blitzen / Die Sterne / So hell durch die Nacht’ sails easily up the stave, its shape a contraction of the more gradual ascent of the introduction. As the voice seems to remain poised in space for ‘Nacht’ the piano echoes the tail-end of the vocal phrase in the alto line of its four-part texture (these answering phrases are one of the song’s many touches of genius – they imply a moment’s lag as beams from distant planets take their time to reach us). The poem’s fourth, fifth and sixth lines (‘Bin oft schon / Darüber / Vom Schlummer erwacht’) make up the answering phrase to the first; this is a completion of a musical sentence, but the interjection of the little interlude sets it apart and makes it sound like a reply echoing across mountains and valleys (there are similar echo effects in the Mayrhofer Abschied, and in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen). The beginning of the poem’s second verse moves suddenly into C major, one of those astral turnings which are part of this song’s magic. The composer then repeats the last three lines for a further little exploratory foray which returns to E flat on ‘heilsame Pflicht’. This music for the second half of verse 2 turns out to be one of the two ‘refrains’ which bind the song together (the first ‘refrain’ is in fact the music for the entire first verse). Between every two of Leitner’s strophes Schubert repeats the Vorspiel as an interlude.

The song’s architecture, Schubert’s modified strophic form at its most inspired, might be charted as follows:

The repetitive elements in this song makes it seem as fixed in eternity as the stars themselves. Verses 1, 3, 5 and 7 share the same music, as do the second halves of verses 2, 4 and 6. The introduction is the same as the interludes. Within this ordered universe the deviations, the astral bends, are all the more noticeable. Of the song’s most magical moments one should single out the daring and ravishing excursion into the outer space of C flat major before returning safely to the home ship docked in E flat (verse 4), and the way the music for verse 6 seems to incline earthwards in a moment of compassion (the change to G major here is like a healing balm in sound). This is followed by a return to impersonal cheeriness where Heaven is signalled ‘Mit Fingern von Gold’ in merry, and unconcerned, music in E flat major. These contrasting sections affirm that the stars are both watching over us, and impervious to our fate. That Schubert is able simultaneously to convey both tenderness and indifference is the measure of a masterpiece, out of this world in every way.